Independent UK: Ah, Italy - sunshine, olive oil, blatant racism

Christina Patterson: Ah, Italy - sunshine, olive oil, blatant racism
Headlines in the local and national papers screamed about the crime wave unleashed by the 'immigranti'

Saturday, 21 June 2008



It all started with gunfire. A cannon, in fact. The entire assembled company, including the huge panel of dignitaries lined up at a long, long table in front of us, leapt out of their skins. It continued, rather less dramatically, with speeches. Long, rambling speeches, all in punctilious prose, full of rhetorical flourishes and peppered with praise for the gentili signori and eminent officials packed into the room.

We were there, in a magnificent Gothic palazzo which used to be an Anglican church, to celebrate a "paradise for exiles" – and two of the most eminent ones, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The "paradise for exiles" was the Tuscan spa town of Bagni di Lucca. Known as "the Switzerland of Tuscany", it was once a green and more than pleasant hillside haven for Byron and Shelley as well as the Brownings, and for Strauss, Listz, Puccini, politicians, saints and popes.

The biggest moment of excitement, perhaps, was when a meandering treatise on "The Brownings' friends at Bagni di Lucca" was interrupted by an extremely loud and wacky ring-tone. A bored-looking man dressed as a medieval peasant fumbled around in his pocket and nipped behind the giant flag he was holding to answer it. The second was when somebody unearthed a recording, made at a dinner party in 1889, of Browning reciting his poem "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix". "And into the midnight we galloped abreast," he intones, in an alarmingly high voice, before breaking off and declaring, "I'm sorry, but I can't remember me own verses." The other guests join in with a rousing "Bravo! Hip, hip, hooray!".

If Italy was ever a "paradise for exiles", it certainly isn't now. Well, perhaps for the Brits who still pursue their olive-growing on Tuscan hillside fantasies (if they can stomach the bureaucracy) and for those, like me, who still find an annual dose of food, frescoes and sun-drenched fields and cypresses a balm for the soul. For the Africans selling their fake bags and sunglasses in Pisa and Florence, often living 10 to a room, and who spend their working day being swatted away like flies, it isn't, or for the eastern Europeans who have come seeking work, or for the Romany population that has lived there for centuries.

On the first day of my holiday, headlines in local and national papers screamed about the crime wave unleashed by the immigranti. One lone voice, a Roma academic and musician called Santino Spinelli, who survived as a child by begging on the streets, and whose family has lived in Italy for 600 years, was wheeled out to defend his (dirty, thieving, parasitic) community. On the TV chat show I saw (hosted, as always, by a pneumatic young woman with the make-up of a drag queen), he was treated with the kind of contempt you might reserve for, say, a prime minister who bought his way out of trouble by changing the law, or one who monopolised the media as a way into high office. (Later that night, the TV channel dropped its tedious discussion, and clothes, for a relaxing session, with three silicone-breasted women with shaved pubes, in a shower.) .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-ah-italy--sunshine-olive-oil-blatant-racism-851636.html

All of that terrible racist shit could only be perpetrated by Italians.

Let's just pick every country in the world and post an article on DU about why they suck.

Italy's out of the way.

Who's next?

.... Plenty of articles about racism in the USA get posted here, n'est-ce pas?

I'm reading a book by Margaret McMillan: "Paris, 1919", and I recommend it. The interesting thing to me was that the Japanese were trying to get a clause decrying racial equality entered into the language of the League of Nations during all negotiations. However, the Japanese are racists themselves! Their Korean minority are definitely relegated to second class status.

Every society is racist in nature, and by 'society' I'm talking about cultural cohesion, such as language, custom, law, and yes, color, and has nothing to do with so-called 'borders'. These are the same issues that keep coming up.

The Treaty of Versailles had to deal with this every day they were in session for over six months. Italy wanted sections of the Balkans, because the Slavs there were basically 'hillbillies' in desperate need of the civilizing influence of the heirs to Rome (according to the Italians, anyway, the Serbs thought they had a mission to 'civilize' Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia, also)

It goes on and on. Wandering, cross-border people, such as the Jews, Roma and Kurds (and there were a lot more of these groups in 1919, but these were the big three) had it rough and were identified as alien, and therefore, suspicious groups in the midst of whatever 'Fatherland/Motherland' you happened to be a citizen of. Easy to blame when the crops failed, as the Armenians discovered in 1915 when they were marched out to the desert to die en mass.

In Indonesia today, folks of Chinese descent get it rough once in awhile. Yes, there is definitely racism in America, how could there not be?

However, that stuff goes all the way around and is a two-way street. There is no group that is pure, and conciliatory toward other groups.

If there was an Asian, an Amerind and a Black sitting around a table, and they had never met before, do you think that they would sit there and immediately establish a rapport based on how badly White society treated their particular group?

Of course not, and it's naive to think otherwise. All three of those individuals would have to deal with their own prejudicial conceptions of the other two groups.

If a "White Plague" killed all those of European descent, would these three groups, as well as all the other groups and minorities, hold hands and dance in the streets, united because a common oppressor was eliminated, and they were one big happy family?

Hell, no! There would be speeches about who deserved more based on historical wrongs done to their ancestors by the Europeans. For the record, I think the Amerinds have a pretty strong case, seeings how they were here first, and all, but anyway.

Obama will discover that the honeymoon will be short-lived when he has to deal with all of this.

He needs to lay out his domestic policy aims in clear language, because I guarantee he will have his hands full with Blacks claiming he hasn't done enough for Black people, and while they thought they were voting for a Black President, it turns out they elected a Tom (horrors!).

There will be White people, as well as Hispanics, Asians, etc, etc, who will bitch that he's doing everything for the Black community, but nothing for any other group such as, say, theirs.

No President will have the same dynamic as he will, because no matter what Obama does, this will be an aspect of his administration.

He's going to be forced to present an entire cross section of American racial groups, genders, sexual preference and cultures in his Cabinet.

Why? Because of the natural xenophobia present not just in America, but everywhere. It's part of the human condition.

This was in a British, not American, newspaper by the way.

Xenophobia and anti-immigrant bigotry are serious problems in Europe; and right at the moment, somewhat out-of-hand in Italy. This needs to be recognized as a problem - and does not diminish or excuse the problem of racism in the USA.